Bypassing Cylance AI Malware Detection via Universal String
Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptAdversarial evasion
Researchers created a universal bypass string appended to malicious files to evade detection by Cylance's AI malware detector. This was a research exercise demonstrating vulnerability in commercial security software.
Details
- type
- Attack on AIAn AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
- categories
- Adversarial evasionInputs crafted to make a model misclassify or miss detections (perturbations, evasion of AI-based defences).
- Adversarial evasion
- owasp llm top 10
- no entry for these categories
- mitre atlas
- Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
- severity
- 1 · Research / proof of conceptDemonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
- targets
- Enterprise deployment
- products
- CylancePROTECT, Cylance Smart Antivirus
- incident date
- 7 Sep 2019
- first reported
- 3 Dec 2020
- origin
- MITRE ATLASDerived from MITRE ATLAS (Apache 2.0, © MITRE).
- classifier confidence
- 0.95 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
- tags
- adversarial-evasion · malware-detection · cylance
- record
- created 2026-10-18 06:55Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:55Z · json
Sources · 3
- 2020-12-03Bypassing Cylance's AI Malware DetectionMITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0003
- 2020-12-03Skylight Cyber Blog Post, "Cylance, I Kill You!"skylightcyber.com · skylightcyber.com/2019/07/18/cylance-i-kill-you
- 2020-12-03Statements from Skylight Cyber CEOsecurity7.net · security7.net/news/the-new-cylance-vulnerability-what-you-need-to-know
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